After more than a year away from Denmark, I took a weekend trip away from Hamburg to visit my friends in Aarhus.

Aarhus has changed, and it hasn’t. After a 4-and-a-half hour train ride due north, I found myself downtown in a city which I had once called my home. It was a surreal feeling, with everything at once so strange and so familiar.

According to Wikipedia, Preparing a European Capital of Culture can be an opportunity for the city to generate considerable cultural, social and economic benefits and it can help foster urban regeneration, change the city’s image and raise its visibility and profile on an international scale.

You know what another word for “urban regeneration” is? Gentrification. And the gentrification was hard to miss.

One of Hamburg’s most popular tourist attractions is the array of boat tours exploring the city’s various waterways. Between the Alster, a large lake in the middle of the city, the Elbe, one of Germany’s three major rivers, and the various canals criss-crossing the city center, there is certainly plenty of water to explore.

Looking across the river Elbe towards downtown Hamburg, as seen from the “Theater am Hafen” (Theater in the Harbor).

I signed up for a mailing list last semester to get updates on university-sponsored excursions throughout the city. I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but one week an advertisement for an Alternative Harbor Tour caught my eye.

Experience one of the largest harbors in the world – the Port of Hamburg, also known as the “Gates to the World.” This is no ordinary harbor tour. It will lead you through canals with rusty wharfs and along the state of the art, powerful container facilities, where the warehouse walls and steel scaffolding store the harbor’s treasures: Oriental carpets, southern fruits, coffee and cocoa beans. They are the treasures of the old colonial powers as well as the modern globalization. The containers hide their contents, making the movement of goods invisible. It’s a tour that reveals a new side of the harbor – who wins and who loses in this period of globalization. We look forward to your participation!Continue reading “Exploring Hamburg’s harbor”→